Kerry's no Ike

In 1952, the incumbent President was not running for re-election, but the nation seemed bogged down in a frustrating war on the Korean peninsula — one that had see-sawed from near hopelessness around the Pusan pocket, to what might be termed "catastrophic success" after MacArthur's Inchon landing and American troops' advance almost to the Yalu River, to a humiliating retreat from the Chosin Reservoir after Red Chinese troops poured across their borders, and into a bloody stalemate along the 38th Parallel.  America had suffered almost 37,000 KIAs in the first three years of fighting in Korea; the new President would have to decide between withdrawal, continuing the stalemate, escalation (possibly including use of atomic weapons), or some other course of action.

Late in the campaign, on October 24, 1952, the Republican candidate delivered a speech in Detroit that Tom Wicker describes thusly in his 2002 short biography, Dwight D. Eisenhower (bracketed portions, italics, and elipses in original; at page 16):

In earlier years, [Eisenhower] had seemed to support President Truman's "police action" in Korea and also had approved Truman's decision to fire Eisenhower's old boss, General Douglas MacArthur.  Now, however, Eisenhower declared that immediately after the election, he would "concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war.... [T]hat job requires a personal trip to Korea.  I shall make that trip .... I shall go to Korea."

Ike the inexperienced campaigner had made one of the decisive strokes in American political history.  He carefully had not said what he would do about Korea, other than to see the war for himself, thus establishing at the outset his characteristic policy of "keeping his options open."  But from the hero of World War II, less than two weeks before the election, his mere pledge to "go to Korea" all but finished Stevenson and the Democrats.  Even Harry Truman, the old in-fighter in the White House, could only cry "politics" — but to little avail.

Fifty-two years later, the Democratic candidate for President is basing his campaign on the premise that America is again in a bungled military stalemate (despite the vastly shorter timeframe, one-thirty-seventh of the fatal casualties, and absence of a threat that the conflict will escalate into global nuclear war).  Like Eisenhower, John Kerry asks the American public to trust him — essentially on faith — to somehow "fix things."

Americans felt that they knew Dwight David Eisenhower — that they'd seen him tested, and liked what they'd seen, when he commanded Allied forces in Europe in their defeat of Nazi Germany.  He was elected with 55 percent of the popular vote and a 442/89 electoral college margin.  The North Koreans and their Chinese and Russian patrons rapidly backed down from their previous negotiating positions — perhaps because they thought Eisenhower would use nukes, perhaps because they knew he'd never tolerate years of stalemated conventional war — and on July 27, 1953, barely six months after Eisenhower's inauguration, an armistice was signed under the shelter of which South Korea has enjoyed a half-century of peace, liberty, and economic expansion.  Yes, there's still unfinished business on the Korean peninsula today, and the threat posed by the North Koreans is a grave one that will confront whoever wins the 2004 presidential election.  But the enormous trust conferred by the American electorate upon Eisenhower in 1952 would seem, by almost anyone's evaluation today, to have been well justified in hindsight.

The questions today, then, are these:  Do Americans, and does the world, think as highly of John Kerry's resolution and leadership abilities as they did of Dwight Eisenhower's in 1952?  Will our friends feel the same confidence in his word?  Will our enemies feel the same fear of his war-leading abilities?  Has Sen. Kerry earned, by his career accomplishments, the degree of trust that Americans gave Ike to fulfill a vague and open-ended promise of such critical importance?  Like Ike did, Sen. Kerry promises a change in course, without much detail.  American voters were willing to accept that promise, and that lack of detail, from Eisenhower.  But does John Kerry inspire that kind of blind faith, and can it be justified?

To ask that question is very nearly to answer it.  Behind the catchiest slogan in American political history — "I like Ike!" — was a profound and hard-earned trust and admiration.  Eisenhower had already won a war when he asked us to trust him.  He'd masterfully handled one of the most difficult military and political challenges of world history — benefiting, perhaps, from being "misunderestimated" at first, but ultimately winning world-wide respect and admiration.  John Kerry, by contrast, offers up a three-month combat tour as a junior officer that he bailed out of at his first opportunity, plus a consistent senatorial history as an opponent of the use of American military force, an undercutter of its and our intelligence community's strength, and a gratuitous insulter of America's best and most consistent friends abroad.

When John Kerry says, "Trust me and I'll fix things in Iraq and with the Global War on Terror" — what possible basis can you have to give him that trust, other than a faith so blind that it has become genuinely reckless?